by Alia Volz
The Jenkses soon got busted for growing two pot plants in their yard. While awaiting trial, they heard about the Compassionate IND program—the one created to provide Robert Randall with marijuana for his glaucoma. It was almost impossible to get certified. (Only one AIDS patient had been cleared so far, and he’d died ten days later.) But the Jenkses were perfect candidates: conservative, white, heterosexual, monogamous. They took their plight to the media. In 1991, the government agreed to supply them with pot.
The win made headlines. The government was immediately flooded with applications from AIDS patients clamoring for legal access to cannabis.
Bush’s response was to abruptly shut the Compassionate IND program down. The handful of people already cleared would continue to receive their government weed, but all pending applications would be cancelled without review.
* * *
Back in San Francisco, Dennis Peron was channeling his grief into action. He’d been an activist for decades, but Jonathan’s death stoked the flame. “It’s not just about marijuana,” he became fond of saying. “It’s about America. It’s about how we treat each other as people.”
In 1991, Dennis got Proposition P on the ballot, a resolution declaring that the city of San Francisco supported medical marijuana. It passed with 79 percent of the vote.
Prop. P was toothless; it had no force of law. But it let city officials know how voters felt. Encouraged, Dennis launched the first San Francisco Cannabis Buyers’ Club in a flat on Sanchez Street in the Castro. This endeavor harked back to the Big Top Marijuana Supermarket of the 1970s—but with crucial differences: the new club was staffed by people with AIDS and catered to the needs of the sick; and unlike Dennis’s previous ventures, this one operated in the open.
Dennis fully expected to get arrested and make his case in court. But at the apex of the AIDS crisis, city officials were ready to let it slide. By that point, San Francisco had the highest per capita concentration of HIV cases in the western world. On average, thirty-one people were dying of AIDS-related conditions every week in the City. Even Republican Mayor Frank Jordan, a former police chief, signed a resolution ordering the SFPD and the DA to make medical marijuana their lowest priority. Dragging dying people to jail didn’t look good.
Peron soon relocated to a more prominent space on Church and Fourteenth streets where he could serve a larger population. As historian Martin A. Lee points out, small underground cannabis clubs sprang up around the country as word spread: New York, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Little Rock, Key West, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. But none of these other facilities operated openly—and with the acquiescence of city government—like the one in San Francisco.
* * *
Around this time, Cleve Jones’s health took a nosedive. He’d been touring frenetically with the quilt, hiding his worsening symptoms and making excuses for canceled appearances. When he could no longer pretend, his family helped him buy a cabin on the Russian River. His T-cell count dropped to a perilous 200 and then tanked to 23 (a healthy range being 500 to 1,600). When his chronic pneumonia developed into the deadly Pneumocystis carinii variety in 1994, Cleve figured he was dying.
In a last-ditch effort, his doctor, Marcus Conant, got him into an experimental drug trial through the “expanded access” program ACT UP had wrestled into being. Cleve’s regimen combined AZT with two other antiretroviral drugs, ddC and 3TC, plus minuscule amounts of Bactrim; he was horribly allergic to the latter, but he needed it to fight pneumocystis. He vomited relentlessly on this combination, eventually dragging pillows into the bathroom so he could sleep next to the toilet. The pills wouldn’t stay in his stomach.
An old friend named Shep, whose lover of many years had recently died, came up from the City to nurse him. “Poor Sheppy was so brave,” Cleve says, thinking back. “He knew I was giving up, so he came.” Shep knew all sorts of tricks from nursing his partner. To get a little nourishment into his patient, he’d place a tiny cube of chicken, a single broccoli floret, and one ravioli on an oversized plate. “You only have to eat this much,” he’d say.
The vomiting persisted. Late one night, Shep brought a lit joint into the bathroom. Cleve, who could barely breathe as it was, waved the joint away. But Shep talked him into a small toke. Cleve coughed painfully, but he stopped retching. With a second careful hit, the nausea receded. After the third puff, Cleve leaned back against the bathtub, and sighed, “Damn, dude, I’m hungry.”
He couldn’t smoke much because of the pneumonia, but by alternating tiny hits of pot with small portions of edibles, Cleve was able to tolerate the meds, which began to work. A couple of weeks later, he awoke in the early morning to a gentle mist wending between the redwoods surrounding his cabin. He heard birds twittering and felt his stomach growl. He had an erection for the first time in many months.
He was going to live.
Poor Brownie Mary couldn’t stay out of jail.
In July 1992, the sixty-nine-year-old got busted yet again for baking with pot—this time at a friend’s house in Sonoma County. Instead of taking a plea deal like before, she decided to fight. “If the narcs think I’m gonna stop baking cookies for my kids with AIDS,” she famously said at a rally, “they can go fuck themselves in Macy’s window.”
The old lady baking illegal cookies for the dying made great news copy. With her thirteen years of volunteerism and her grandmotherly cheekiness, she became a press darling. Mary had gotten coverage in California before, but this time her story went international. The London Times ran a piece. Dr. Donald Abrams saw the bust covered on TV in a hotel room in Amsterdam. Mary appeared on The Maury Povich Show and Good Morning America.
When she testified at a hearing on the implementation of Prop. P at city hall in August, Mary received a standing ovation. Supervisor Terence Hallinan called her the “Florence Nightingale of the medical-marijuana movement” and ushered in a resolution proclaiming August 25 Brownie Mary Day in San Francisco.
In November, Sonoma County Municipal Judge Knoel Owen made the unorthodox ruling that Mary could use medical necessity as a defense if she submitted the names and conditions of the patients she supplied with dosed baked goods.
The DA threw in the towel. After dropping the charges, he said, “If her attorneys feel that medical necessity should be a defense to charges of violating the marijuana laws of the state, then they should take their case to the state legislature.”
And that’s what they did.
* * *
Four years later, Proposition 215, coauthored by Dennis Peron, passed a statewide vote in California.
Two months before the vote, the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement had raided the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers’ Club, which had relocated to a converted warehouse on Market Street that Dennis liked to call his “five-story felony.” The two-year sting had involved fake patients, surveillance, and forged doctors’ notes. It culminated with a showy raid by one hundred black-clad state agents using a battering ram. They ransacked the club, demolishing art and furnishings, and wreaking chaos. The club was forced to close, but in November 1996, the proposition won anyway.
The Compassionate Use Act, as it was called, had received support from some surprising corners. Financiers included multibillionaire philanthropist George Soros and CEOs of the Men’s Wearhouse clothing chain and the Progressive Corporation. A groundswell of activism was also rising from within communities of color harmed by the drug war. Iconic California rappers like Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, and Cypress Hill put smoking chronic back on trend—more fashionable than it had been since the sixties. There were rallies, smoke-ins, and benefit concerts. Undoubtedly, some of the 56 percent of Californians who voted for Prop. 215 cared more about dismantling unjust drug war policies or legalizing weed altogether than about medicinal use. But by centering the debate around compassion for the gravely ill, the medical-marijuana movement tipped the scales.
Because cannabis still was—and still is at the time of this writing—a Schedule 1 narc
otic, Prop. 215 had to be worded delicately so as not to directly contradict federal marijuana laws. Police officers could still arrest everyone, including terminally ill patients, for any and all marijuana offenses. But the new legislation created a viable defense in court provided that the accused could prove they were using marijuana with a doctor’s recommendation. Doctors, meanwhile, couldn’t legally prescribe cannabis as a Schedule 1 drug, but they could recommend it as a matter of free speech.
There were many battles ahead. In response to Prop. 215, the director of the Clinton administration’s Office of National Drug Control Policy threatened to bar doctors from participating in Medicare and Medicaid and revoke their prescription licenses if they recommended cannabis. A group of physicians and patients lead by AIDS doctor Marcus Conant waged a six-year battle for their First Amendment right to discuss marijuana as a treatment option—eventually winning before the Supreme Court. California cannabis clubs, even when left alone by city and state cops, were still subject to federal DEA raids. The legal headaches went on and on. But Prop. 215 was revolutionary; it was the first medical-marijuana legislation in the United States built to stand up in state criminal court.
On the foggy morning of January 15, 1997, a fifty-one-year-old Dennis hosted a tearful reopening ceremony outside the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers’ Club at 1444 Market Street—which, at the request of city hall, would become a nonprofit. As the ceremonial ribbon was snipped, Dennis said, “America is never going to be the same!”
He was right. As of 2019, forty-six states have enacted laws supporting medical marijuana; eleven states (plus D.C.) permit adult recreational use. The trend of state-authorized cannabis use grows with every voting cycle.
All of this is in defiance of federal law. But the wall is beginning to crack. A group of determined parents with epileptic children, led by a neuroscientist named Catherine Jacobson, got the FDA to approve a nonpsychoactive CBD-based drug called Epidiolex for two rare forms of epilepsy in June 2018. Three months later, the DEA reclassified Epidiolex under Schedule 5. The rescheduling pertains to this specific drug—no other CBD extracts and nothing containing THC—but it’s the first plant-based cannabis drug that doctors can legally prescribe in the United States.
Meanwhile, a quasilegal CBD market booms in states that allow it—from all manner of infused edibles and drinkables to oils, lotions, suppositories, and even supplements for pets. According to the New York Times, CVS and Walgreens have both announced plans to carry CBD merchandise in certain areas. A 2017 study documented that 69 percent of the products tested contained either more or less CBD than advertised. Marijuana is sometimes portrayed as a miracle panacea able to prevent—even cure—a dizzying array of illnesses. Although recent revelations about the endocannabinoid system suggest terrific potential, the science is still young and impeded by federal prohibition. Through its unwillingness to reasonably regulate cannabis, the federal government may be exposing consumers to irresponsible operators.
In today’s San Francisco, where recreational marijuana is permitted, one sometimes sees techies casually vaping cannabis on lunch breaks. If only they knew the wild and heavy history behind that right. The AIDS crisis is painful to conjure, painful to relive. Easier to let the past fade, to toke up and forget. But we would not have legal weed today without yesterday’s losses.
* * *
Since the first reported deaths in 1981, people had been waiting. Waiting for the cure, the vaccine, the ray of hope. Waiting for the government machine to develop a sense of urgency.
In late 1995 and early 1996, the first protease inhibitors reached the market. This new class of drugs blocked an enzyme necessary for the virus to mature and replicate, arresting its progress in the body. Taken in combination with other medications—what became known as the “cocktail”—protease inhibitors began to extend lives. People rose from their deathbeds, a phenomenon some doctors described as the “Lazarus effect.” 1996 was the first year since the epidemic began that the CDC reported fewer AIDS-related deaths than the year before. The tide turned.
Abel, Sian’s lover, had died nine months before the first protease inhibitor was released—while the new class of drugs was navigating the layers of FDA testing and bureaucracy. Gino, Barry’s partner, died twelve months too soon.
I’m often struck by the waste of potential. The unpainted paintings, the uncomposed music, the undesigned buildings, the unwritten books. “It’s very frustrating because here I am at the pinnacle of my career,” Randy Shilts told 60 Minutes a few months before his death in 1994. He’d written And the Band Played On, a groundbreaking chronicle of the epidemic’s early years. “I could do literally anything I wanted in the world of journalism, and you’re left with the strange feeling that your life is somehow finished without being completed.”
Protease inhibitors didn’t stop the dying in the United States—and certainly not abroad; by late 1996, an estimated 23 million people were living with HIV worldwide. But for those who could obtain the new drugs, survival became one possible outcome. On August 13, 1998, the Bay Area Reporter carried a stunning headline in gigantic red print: NO OBITS. It was the first week in seventeen years that San Francisco’s major gay paper hadn’t received a single obituary to run.
* * *
Sometime during the early 1990s, Dennis Peron threw a party. My mom doesn’t recall if it was for Christmas or a fundraiser or a birthday, or if it happened at the first or second San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club. The room was crowded and fogged with skunky smoke. Out of the haze hobbled a pudgy, curly-haired woman in owlish glasses.
“You must be Brownie Mary,” my mom said. “I’m Mer, also known as the Brownie Lady.”
“Hey, you’re the one who never got busted!”
“And you’re the one who always did.”
They had both, of course, been hearing about each other for years. It was something of a joke among mutual friends that they were never seen in the same room at the same time, like Superman and Clark Kent.
The industry veterans shared a hug and a laugh before the crowd pulled them in different directions.
Someone posts a lovely tribute to Brownie Mary in a nostalgic Facebook group. A long comment thread follows. People share memories of Mary, her kindness, her delicious ganja treats.
I can’t help but notice that a few of the comments are actually about Sticky Fingers. One woman writes, “I had PLENTY of her brownies back in the day. She had that storefront in the Mission, and every Friday we would gather a group, and everyone would grab a dozen. The first and best edibles ever, and they were pretty affordable as I recall too, I think 20 or 25 a dozen!! The bags used to have cute sayings on them too, I may have one in storage. RIP Mary.”
I decide to respond only because her memory is so specific (and my mom is not dead). “You’re thinking of my family’s business,” I write. “Sticky Fingers Brownies.”
The commenter seems dubious. “Ok,” she writes, “I know how I can tell for sure. What was the last message printed on the paper bags when they closed?”
That’s easy: Give it up and you get it all.
Next thing I know, she’s messaging me to ask for the recipe. Sure, she can buy all kinds of cannabis products at legal dispensaries now. But as she puts it, “The good old days of edibles is changed.”
The Brownie Mary/Brownie Lady confusion pops up regularly, though I almost never say anything. They were part of the same zeitgeist. And if my mom slipped through the cracks of history, that’s just fine.
It means she got away with it.
* * *
Late one chilly autumn night in 1998, Meridy realized that she was free to move on.
At fifty-one years old, she was living alone in San Francisco, involved in an unsatisfying relationship, and wrestling with a cocaine habit that had gotten out of hand. She had been diagnosed with diabetes and was suffering peripheral neuropathy in her feet—especially painful on cold nights like this one. Her lifestyle was catching up.
She was still selling weed to make ends meet, but with cannabis clubs proliferating, the marijuana underground was not as lucrative—not as necessary—as it used to be. The City seemed full of ghosts, so many friends gone, so many memories. Her child had grown up; I was turning twenty, living with roommates; I had a job and friends, and was chasing my own life.
Mer felt superfluous in more ways than one.
She pictured a warm beach in Mexico. Maybe, she thought, it’s time to get out of the biz . . . Like most of her big decisions, this one came down to three I Ching coins rocking and rolling in the palm of her hand.
Mer pulled together $900 and bought a ticket to Puerto Vallarta. She found a small apartment walking distance from a gay beach and set up an easel under a palapa. She drew colorful oil pastels of men on the beach and sold them for twenty dollars a pop. Between her gift for gab and hustle, the fine portraits she could turn out while her subjects sunbathed, and a favorable exchange rate, she rustled up enough business to get by. Within a year, she’d found representation and a ritzy gallery to carry her larger paintings, which sold well enough to expats and tourists to support a modest lifestyle. She would stay there for ten years. And she always knew she could unfold her portable easel under a palapa if things got “scrapey.”
After twenty-two years in the weed business, Mer took a classic page from the dealer playbook and played it clean: escape to a tropical paradise.
